Eitzen, in the
first paragraph of his perceptive piece on defining documentary,
writes, "All documentaries  whether they are deemed,
in the end, to be reliable or not  revolve around questions
of trust. A documentary is any motion picture that is susceptible
to the question 'Might it be lying?'" Since we are discussing
fake documentaries, or fiction films that adopt the cinematic
constructs of documentaries, the question must be inverted. "Could
it actually have happened?" is a relevant question to ask,
as each and every mock documentary depends on its viewers believing
its premise. That is not to say that viewers must believe that
Spinal Tap is a real band or that a film crew would actually
follow a serial killer on his "route" for This Is Spinal
Tap and Man Bites Dog to work. But for the films to be successful
in their co-opting of documentary form, viewers must believe
that the subject matter of a mock documentary must in some way
be part and parcel of the real world. There is nothing intrinsically
implausible about a filmmaker deciding to film his favorite band
as they embark on their first U.S. tour in six years; neither
is it inconceivable that a film crew (albeit one with loose morals)
would follow a serial murderer as he goes out on his rounds.As I argue above, part of
what makes a successful mock documentary is its ability to exist
at the same time in the world of the fictive and the world of
the actual. This is similar to Carl Plantinga's argument in an
article entitled, "Defining Documentary: Fiction, Non-Fiction,
and Projected Worlds." Plantinga adapts the theories of
Nicholas Wolterstorff and asserts,"In general, documentary
refers to the actual world by taking an assertive stance toward
its projected world. With fiction a fictive stance is taken,
and the state of affairs presented is not asserted to be true."Plantinga holds that a documentary
film will make claims about the real world by taking a strong
position, one way or another, on its own subject matter. And
since any documentary's subject matter is part and parcel of
the real world, the film can comment on the world around it implicitly
by commenting on its own subject matter explicitly.Though Plantinga discusses
traditional documentary and makes no mention of its parodic forms,
his ideas, interestingly, apply to mock documentaries, as well.
In a mock documentary, the "assertive stance" taken
is that, despite appearances to the contrary, the people and
events depicted within the film exist in the real world. That
is, mock documentary's assertive stance is that the specific
world it projects does not really exist, though the larger world
that encompasses that specific world does exist and can be studied
through the lens of the smaller, more specific world. A mock
documentary makes certain assertions about its subject matter,
just as a traditional documentary does. The difference is that
implicit in any assertion made by a mock documentary is the fact
that its projected world, while a subset of the actual world,
does not necessarily follow the actual world's guidelines for
existence. So a mock documentary, like a traditional documentary,
can refer to the actual world by making assertions about its
projected world.